tag:theconversation.com,2011:/es/topics/the-future-of-higher-education-11662/articlesthe future of higher education – The Conversation2016-04-03T20:08:06Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/567332016-04-03T20:08:06Z2016-04-03T20:08:06ZBudget should give universities more flexibility on student contributions<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116740/original/image-20160330-28445-1dbbite.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Should students pay more towards their degree?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">from www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Australian government is committed to making inroads into its <a href="http://www.budget.gov.au/2015-16/content/myefo/download/MYEFO_2015-16_Final.pdf">A$36 billion budget deficit</a> in the forthcoming May budget. </p>
<p>Universities and students will not escape unscathed. </p>
<p>While the <a href="https://theconversation.com/education-minister-says-uni-fees-wont-change-for-2016-48432">2014 fee deregulation plan</a> was shelved late last year, the 20% reduction in tuition subsidies is still baked into the budget forward estimates. The government is not likely to walk away from this and will be under pressure to provide universities with the means to recover at least part of the budget cuts. </p>
<p>The most likely option for the government at this stage is to increase the student contribution limits.</p>
<p>These currently range from <a href="http://studyassist.gov.au/sites/studyassist/helppayingmyfees/csps/pages/student-contribution-amounts">$6,256 to $10,440</a> per year. This represents on average about <a href="https://theconversation.com/fact-check-what-do-students-contribute-to-their-own-degrees-27280">40%</a> of the cost per student to the university.</p>
<h2>May budget - what to expect</h2>
<p>The government may well look to other ways of further shifting the costs of higher education from the taxpayer to the student in the May budget. This could include changes to Higher Education Loan Program (HELP) debt repayment arrangements such as higher interest rates, <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-lowering-the-student-loan-repayment-threshold-fair-for-students-56814">lower repayment thresholds</a> and recovering debts from <a href="https://theconversation.com/chasing-unpaid-student-loans-could-save-government-800m-25321">deceased estates</a>.</p>
<p>Students and many universities would decry such cost shifting as they always have, but their arguments don’t stack up. </p>
<p>It is true that government funding of tertiary institutions in Australia is ranked low by international standards, yet the quality of our system is much more highly ranked – <a href="http://www.universitas21.com/news/details/186/u21-ranking-of-national-higher-education-systems-2015">10th out of 50 in fact in 2015</a>. So it is not clear that relatively low government funding is holding us back.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116867/original/image-20160331-28459-12dgw9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116867/original/image-20160331-28459-12dgw9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=400&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116867/original/image-20160331-28459-12dgw9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=400&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116867/original/image-20160331-28459-12dgw9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=400&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116867/original/image-20160331-28459-12dgw9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=503&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116867/original/image-20160331-28459-12dgw9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=503&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116867/original/image-20160331-28459-12dgw9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=503&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">‘Even if the student contributions were to double it would still be the best rate of return a young person is ever likely to get on an investment.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">from www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
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<h2>Why students should pay more</h2>
<p>More importantly, a greater student contribution makes sense on grounds of equity, good resource allocation and quality of education.</p>
<p>A university degree increases lifetime earnings <a href="http://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/162_graduate_winners_report.pdf">by about A$1 million</a> on average, or <a href="https://theconversation.com/fact-check-what-do-students-contribute-to-their-own-degrees-27280">75% more than for non-graduates</a>. </p>
<p>So even if the student contributions were to double it would still be the best rate of return a young person is ever likely to get on an investment.</p>
<p>The current 60% government contribution toward the cost of education is a subsidy from people who have never had the opportunity of a university education. </p>
<p>Next time you go into a shop to buy a pair of shoes, try explaining to the full-time shop assistant why they should pay more taxes for the lucrative investments of students from privileged backgrounds. </p>
<p>Yes, the shop assistant should pay something to account for the positive spillovers that higher education provides to other people in the workplace and community. But why a 60% taxpayer contribution? A cut to, say, 40% or 50% would surely be reasonable.</p>
<p>The current student contribution limits are price caps and, like other price caps, they tend to hurt the people they are intended to help: low socio-economic status (SES) students. </p>
<p>The reason low SES students get hurt is that universities restrict places in some courses by imposing high academic entry scores, and it is the low SES students who disproportionately miss out on places. They are <a href="https://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/review_of_the_demand_driven_funding_system_report_for_the_website.pdf">less likely</a> to finish Year 12 and are less likely to have a high ATAR score than high SES students.</p>
<p>Universities have an incentive to shift resources to fee-paying international and post-graduate courses and to restrict Commonwealth-supported places for domestic students in some courses at least.</p>
<p>We see this in courses where universities ration places using academic entry scores that are way above what is necessary to ensure that only academically prepared students get in. </p>
<p>Despite bonus schemes and alternative pathways, low SES students are still <a href="https://www.tasa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/LacroixCChestersJ.pdf">disproportionately excluded</a> by high academic entry criteria.</p>
<p>Increasing the price caps (student contribution limits) would therefore increase supply of places in some courses, which would improve access to low SES students. </p>
<p>Would they pay? Yes. A <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/education/library/study/2014/cost-sharing/comparative-report_en.pdf">nine-country study</a> has shown that fees have little or no effect on the proportion of low SES students in universities – and not all those countries have the fee-HELP scheme that blunts the demand response to higher fees. </p>
<p>Also, nothing else we’ve done seems to have had much effect on the proportion of low SES students in Australian universities. This has <a href="https://theconversation.com/who-goes-to-university-the-changing-profile-of-our-students-40373">barely shifted over the past 15 years</a> despite the 2008 <a href="http://apo.org.au/resource/review-australian-higher-education-final-report">Bradley Review </a>lifting of enrolment caps and a plethora of retention schemes targeted at low SES students.</p>
<p>Allowing the student contribution to increase would also improve the student experience. Smaller classes, better equipment, better support services and better academic staff can all improve quality but at higher cost. If these investments can be recouped through higher student contributions, they are more likely to go ahead.</p>
<p>We should not presume that all universities will always increase their student contributions to the limit for all courses. </p>
<h2>Taxing universities</h2>
<p>Fears of price gouging in response to partial fee deregulation are unwarranted. </p>
<p>First, competition will restrict price gouging to some extent and will challenge universities to pick their price point and tailor packages of tuition to that price.</p>
<p>The international student market, for example, is highly competitive and universities compete on price and product differentiation.</p>
<p>And if that doesn’t work, policies are available to restrict price gouging by, for example, shifting some of the cost of unpaid HELP debts back to the universities to encourage them to factor this in when setting their prices. </p>
<p>We could require universities to pay a percentage of total unpaid student debt arising from their courses. This would force universities to carefully consider the affordability of their fees.</p>
<p>The last-resort policy response to price gouging is to tax universities that abuse their monopoly power in the same way as we impose special taxes on mining companies.</p>
<p>This would be better than restricting places through price caps. Then at least students from disadvantaged backgrounds would not be turned away from prestige institutions by unnecessarily high academic entry standards.</p>
<p>There is no need for $100,000 university degrees. But some further price flexibility would be good for disadvantaged students and for the quality of the student experience across the board.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56733/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ross Guest has received funding from the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT). The views expressed here are the author&#39;s personal views which may not reflect the views of the OLT or Griffith University.</span></em></p>In the May Budget, the government may look for ways to shift the costs of higher education from the taxpayer to the student.Ross Guest, Professor of Economics and National Senior Teaching Fellow, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/409412015-05-27T05:47:18Z2015-05-27T05:47:18ZExplainer: what is credentialism and is a degree more than just a piece of paper?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/82718/original/image-20150522-32562-w7lfhw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Worth what it&#39;s written on?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Students graduating by michaeljung/www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Gaining that required qualification to put on your CV is what counts to win a job in today’s “graduate economy”. On current trends, perhaps everyone will have a degree by the end of this century. Already in Finland, a remarkable <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11438140">80% of young people</a> are now going to university.</p>
<p>With so many people obtaining degree qualifications there are concerns that academic credentials are losing meaning and value. “Credentialism”, a <a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Credentialism.aspx">concept coined by social scientists in the 1970s</a>, is the reduction of qualifications to status conferring pieces of paper. It’s an ideology which puts formal educational credentials above other ways of understanding human potential and ability. </p>
<p>Credentialism is <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-deans-plea-let-students-discover-knowledge-without-pressure-to-impress-40682">creeping back</a> into the higher education debate as academics and the wider public attempt to make sense of the university system we now have. Students <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/tuition-fees-four-fifths-of-students-believe-their-degree-isnt-worth-the-money-9928635.html">are asking</a> if their degrees are worth the tuition fees they are expected to pay back as long-term loans. University academics bemoan the pressures of grade inflation and systems of teaching which resemble factories. Meanwhile, online learning and the growth of accredited university certificates through massive open online courses (MOOCs) on website like <a href="https://www.coursera.org/">Coursera</a> offer an alternative to traditional university enrolment.</p>
<p>These are all important issues to debate for the future of our universities. But they ignore the fundamental value of credentials in the workplace.</p>
<p>Let’s take the appalling story of Victorino Chua, a Filipino nurse working at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, who on May 19 received <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-32795255">25 life sentences</a> for poisoning and murdering multiple patients. Investigations by police and journalists have raised questions about the <a href="http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-32493830">validity of Chua’s nursing qualifications</a> and his academic record when studying in the Philippines. There have been suspicions that someone may have sat exams in the place of Chua and his academic transcript may have been tampered with. Fake nursing degrees have been found on sale in the Philippines for as little as £20.</p>
<p>In a BBC interview, the director of nursing and midwifery for the hospital <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-32791609">defended the range of recruitment “checks”</a> that take place, but also admitted they rely on the credentials provided by universities and professional bodies, such as the Nursing and Midwifery Council, and cannot undertake their own detailed investigation into every employee.</p>
<p>The Stepping Hill case tells us that many people across the world are eager to obtain a university education as a passport to employment – and some go to desperate lengths to obtain the required certificate.</p>
<h2>A basic requirement</h2>
<p>A <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647285-more-and-more-money-being-spent-higher-education-too-little-known-about-whether-it">recent report</a> by The Economist on the higher education system argued that a university degree is now the ultimate status symbol for entry into the middle classes across the world. It is the basic requirement for any professional occupation.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/82723/original/image-20150522-32555-1yw9pbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/82723/original/image-20150522-32555-1yw9pbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=400&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82723/original/image-20150522-32555-1yw9pbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=400&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82723/original/image-20150522-32555-1yw9pbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=400&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82723/original/image-20150522-32555-1yw9pbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=502&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82723/original/image-20150522-32555-1yw9pbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=502&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82723/original/image-20150522-32555-1yw9pbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=502&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Difficult to choose between.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Job candidates via BlueSkyImage/www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
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<p>But the world of education is still rife with corruption. Tampering with educational records is unlikely to benefit anyone – and producing cheap forgeries of degree certificates is clearly a pathetic way to attempt to make a living. </p>
<p>This does not mean that certificates represent meaningless qualifications. There is still a so-called <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/10246785/Graduate-premium-no-matter-what-you-study.html">graduate premium</a> in economic terms because employers value the added skills and abilities that graduates can demonstrate. In wider social terms, research suggests a university degree provides many non-market <a href="http://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Publication-Robbins-Revisited-Bigger-and-Better-Higher-Education-David-Willetts.pdf#page=22">benefits to individuals and society</a>, including longer life expectancy, more leisure time, greater social mobility, and a lower propensity to commit crime. These effects are difficult to measure but they change society for the better, and they matter more than almost anything else.</p>
<h2>Beware of class prejudice</h2>
<p>There is a danger that the concept of credentialism is a form of class prejudice in the way that it devalues the qualifications of those parts of the population, both at home and internationally, participating in higher education for the first time.</p>
<p>Personally, I welcome the growth of higher education. I would not want us to return to the elitist world of the early 20th century when less than 1% of the population had the opportunity to get a degree.</p>
<p>So we need to ensure that university is more than a rite of passage culminating in a piece of paper. It is the role of the academic profession and higher education institutions to create worthwhile learning experiences. No one should discourage young people for wanting to better their life chances. If students have unrealistic expectations about education they need more education – not less.</p>
<p>Formal qualifications and paper degree certificates are bureaucratic artefacts, but they are not to blame for credentialism. They are simple and convenient representations of something much bigger and more important.</p>
<p>The fact that education is a global status symbol shows how effective education has become at giving people opportunities in life. However, education needs to be shaped as a public good, not a private commodity, and it therefore needs to be <a href="https://theconversation.com/unregulated-expansion-of-higher-education-costing-millions-38070">carefully regulated</a> by governments and professional associations. Without regulation education is vulnerable to abuse, and this can lead to tragic outcomes.</p>
<p>We need to celebrate the value of higher education and look to its possibilities before prematurely dismissing its growth as crude credentialism.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40941/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Gatenby no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.</span></em></p>Gaining that required qualification to put on your CV is what counts to win a job in today’s “graduate economy”. On current trends, perhaps everyone will have a degree by the end of this century. Already…Mark Gatenby, Lecturer in Organisation Studies, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/396762015-05-14T05:07:29Z2015-05-14T05:07:29ZFive ways universities have already changed in the 21st century<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81379/original/image-20150512-22571-uwzkm7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lots has changed, but not this. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Students graduating by michaeljung/www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Global higher education underwent a period of remarkable change in the first 15 years of the 21st century. Five key trends affecting universities around the world illustrate how, despite increased access to information, our understanding of higher education remains limited. </p>
<p><strong>1. More people are going to university</strong></p>
<p>Since 2000, participation in higher education has increased significantly. UNESCO figures for enrolment in tertiary education show that globally, <a href="http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx">participation rose</a> from 19% in 2000 to 32% in 2012. While the proportions enrolled vary between countries and regions, the increases are pretty much universal. For example, tertiary enrolment in Sub-Saharan Africa has doubled from 4% to 8% over this period.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81375/original/image-20150512-22563-lwb4ej.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81375/original/image-20150512-22563-lwb4ej.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81375/original/image-20150512-22563-lwb4ej.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=338&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81375/original/image-20150512-22563-lwb4ej.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=338&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81375/original/image-20150512-22563-lwb4ej.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=338&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81375/original/image-20150512-22563-lwb4ej.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=425&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81375/original/image-20150512-22563-lwb4ej.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=425&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81375/original/image-20150512-22563-lwb4ej.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=425&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The percentage of those who left secondary five years ago who go on to tertiary education.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>While the increases in participation have been seen everywhere, there have been differences between countries in terms of who is going to university. The <a href="http://www.oecd.org/education/eag.htm">OECD Education at a Glance 2014</a> provides figures for the relative likelihood of participation in higher education for those whose parents engaged in tertiary education and those whose parents did not.</p>
<p>In Italy and Poland you are 9.5 times more likely to attend tertiary education if your parents did, whereas in South Korea and Finland, the proportion is a little over one. The UK and US have among the highest ratios: young people with parents who attended tertiary education are over six times more likely to enrol. These figures show large differences in how equal the expansion of higher education has been across the world and do not appear to relate to differences in tuition fees. </p>
<p>Beyond easy generalisations about the ways in which social hierarchies operate in different national cultures, we are not much closer to understanding the origins of this disturbing variation. </p>
<p><strong>2. People are travelling further afield</strong></p>
<p>While the figures on the proportion of tertiary students enrolled show clear increases, they are slightly misleading because they divide the total number of students by the total number of school-leavers in a country. This means that the proportions can be over or underestimated by the inclusion of international students (both incoming and outgoing) and the proportion of mature students. For example, <a href="http://www.iie.org/%7E/media/Files/Services/ProjectAtlas/Website%202014/Project-Atlas-Trends-and-Global-Data-2014.ashx?la=en">the US and Western Europe</a> are net importers of students, while Sub-Saharan Africa and south and west Asia are net exporters. </p>
<p>According to the OECD, the number of students studying abroad <a href="http://www.iie.org/%7E/media/Files/Services/ProjectAtlas/Website%202014/Project-Atlas-Trends-and-Global-Data-2014.ashx?la=en">more than doubled</a> from 2.1m in 2000 to 4.5m in 2012. While most of the host nations for these international students have remained the same over this period, the one exception is China. It did not figure as a host nation in 2000, yet by 2012, 8% of international students studied there, putting it third behind the US and UK.</p>
<p>The relative impact of these students is different depending on the size of the higher education system in question. In the US, over 800,000 international students make up only 4% of their student population, while the UK has <a href="http://www.iie.org/%7E/media/Files/Services/ProjectAtlas/Website%202014/Project-Atlas-Trends-and-Global-Data-2014.ashx?la=en">around half the number</a> of international students but they make up 20% of the student population. </p>
<p>In the UK, this has led to stories <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2594935/There-Chinese-students-postgraduate-courses-English-universities-British-students.html">about international students dominating particular courses</a>, but we are still in the process of understanding the impact of differing proportions of international students on teaching and learning cultures in universities.</p>
<p><strong>3. The rise of the student experience</strong></p>
<p>As the number and mobility of students have increased, so has the range of experiences that students are offered: from the limited and passive experience of a poorly-designed <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/mooc-students-passive-study-suggests/2012939.article">Massive Open Online Course</a> (MOOC) to students engaging as partners in <a href="https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/engagement-through-partnership-students-partners-learning-and-teaching-higher-education">the design</a> of their curricula and teaching and learning experiences. </p>
<p>This focus on students’ experience has been an important corrective to traditional teacher-focused approaches to teaching in higher education. However, the danger is that highlighting the “student experience” has obscured the essential role that students’ engagement with knowledge plays in the transformative potential of higher education. It is <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-the-race-to-turn-higher-education-into-a-market-were-ignoring-lessons-from-history-35792">knowledge</a> that changes students’ understanding of themselves and the world. </p>
<p><strong>4. Quality of teaching under scrutiny</strong></p>
<p>As the focus on student experience has increased, so has the intensity of scrutiny on the quality of teaching. In Europe, this has been partly informed by <a href="http://www.ehea.info/">the Bologna process</a>, designed to harmonise higher education systems across Europe. Positions in national and international higher education league tables have become a dominant way of representing this quality. Their attraction is understandable: they travel across a number of contexts and audiences, have resonance for prospective students and their families, employers, policy makers, academics and universities, and international bodies. </p>
<p>However, their shortcomings are <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-do-world-university-rankings-actually-mean-32355">equally obvious</a>: they tend to involve unrelated and incomparable measures that are brought together into a single score by algorithms and weightings that lack any statistical credibility. Crucially, the stability at the top of the league tables reinforces privilege: higher status institutions <a href="https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-is-oxford-biased-against-state-students-18979">tend to take</a> in a greater proportion of privileged students. </p>
<p>League tables strongly and wrongly suggest that students who have been to these institutions have received a higher quality education. But this distorts our understanding of teaching, making it about history and prestige rather than about the ways in which students are given access to powerful knowledge.</p>
<p><strong>5. The impact agenda</strong></p>
<p>Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an increasing expectation for research to bring a benefit to the society that funds it. This is now a standard element of research funding in the European Union and South Africa. </p>
<p>While it is very reasonable to expect research to lead to wider social benefits, the particular approach that has been <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-impact-of-impact-on-the-ref-35636">taken to measure this impact</a> has been distorting. The focus on how individual projects impact on societies shows a basic misunderstanding of the way in which research has an impact.</p>
<p>Individual research projects contribute to collective bodies of knowledge in a discipline or professional field. It is these bodies of knowledge that lead to impact, not individual studies. Despite this, we now have myriad <a href="http://impact.ref.ac.uk/CaseStudies/">impact case studies</a> purporting to show the changes single studies have wrought, giving us much more information about impact but potentially obscuring our understanding of the relations between knowledge and society. </p>
<h2>A mixed blessing</h2>
<p>The greater amount of information we have about higher education around the world is a mixed blessing. The measurement and monitoring processes that generate and communicate this information – such as university league tables – <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-do-world-university-rankings-actually-mean-32355">distort</a> what is considered valuable about higher education. </p>
<p>The danger is that the individual, durable and stable elements of higher education that can be easily measured are given a greater value than those that are collective, complex, changing and country-specific. In the face of this, we need to reassert a focus on the communal creation and sharing of knowledge that global universities contribute to the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39676/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Ashwin has received funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the UK Higher Education Academy, the Higher Education Funding Council England, the Scottish Funding Council, and the European Union. He is a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education.</span></em></p>As more people around the world head to university, the quality of teaching and research is coming under tighter scrutiny.Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/357922015-03-10T06:20:04Z2015-03-10T06:20:04ZIn the race to turn higher education into a market, we're ignoring lessons from history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70317/original/image-20150128-22311-417nm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;rect=4%2C88%2C995%2C890&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Not all universities must reform in unison. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-79098160/stock-photo-shot-of-graduation-caps-during-commencement.html?src=Ip6vzAzRUamnX0cnKcTgng-1-26&amp;ws=0">Graduation caps via hxdbzxy/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Universities around the world today face pressure to conform to economic rationality and <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/TOCs/c9619.html">contribute</a> to national innovation. Though often presented as a revolution, driven by “globalisation” or other vague buzzwords, this is nothing new. Research and teaching have never been free from external constraints and public universities have long been expected to justify the resources society devotes to them. </p>
<p>But universities feel threatened and increasingly incapable of fulfilling their primary functions. The question at the centre of most current debates on university reform is to what extent universities themselves should determine the goals, values and norms of pedagogical and scientific practice. For politicians and the general public, academic freedom – even as a noble principle honoured mainly in the breach – is becoming <a href="https://theconversation.com/counter-terrorism-bill-could-be-devastating-for-university-freedoms-36312">meaningless</a>. </p>
<p>Debates on the freedom of higher education are as old as the university. But today’s ideologically imposed constraints are very different from the financial dependence of public universities on the state after 1945. The current international trend towards <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/407359.article">semi-private, semi-public universities</a> poses new challenges to academic freedom. This is exemplified by the <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/stefan-collini/sold-out">dominance of market-based vocabulary</a> and principles for scientific conduct.</p>
<p>And the adoption of corporate management models is leading to the authoritarian concentration of power <a href="https://theconversation.com/collegiality-is-dead-in-the-new-corporatised-university-5539">within universities</a>. Critical voices opposed to current reforms <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/stefan-collini/sold-out">argue</a> that intellectual autonomy is being sacrificed to an unworkable vision of financial autonomy for public universities. </p>
<h2>From Humboldt on…</h2>
<p>These debates are at the heart of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/universities-at-the-crossroads">collection of articles</a> on The Conversation. The pieces shed much needed historical light on the current restructuring of higher education and research – in Europe and beyond. They emerge from a <a href="http://www.eui.eu/SeminarsAndEvents/Events/2014/December/200yearsofdialoguebetweenknowledgeandpowerinEurope.aspx">recent major conference</a> on higher learning and politics. </p>
<p>The cross-national historical comparisons presented here illustrate the peculiarities of the current reform culture. They also demonstrate the historical complexity of the relationship between university and society, and warn against national parochialism. When told there is no alternative, we should look abroad for ready proof to the contrary. </p>
<p>Higher education, society, politics, and the market have had very different interconnections in different countries. As a result, despite the wide influence of <a href="http://www.guildhe.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Andy-Westwood-HEA-June2014l.pdf">marketisation ideology</a>, there are real differences around the world reflected in public discussions on the future of the universities. We give a flavour of that variety here.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70315/original/image-20150128-22305-1twm6yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/70315/original/image-20150128-22305-1twm6yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=800&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70315/original/image-20150128-22305-1twm6yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=800&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70315/original/image-20150128-22305-1twm6yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=800&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70315/original/image-20150128-22305-1twm6yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=1005&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70315/original/image-20150128-22305-1twm6yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=1005&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/70315/original/image-20150128-22305-1twm6yn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=1005&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the modern university.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt#mediaviewer/File:Berlin_-_Wilhelm_von_Humboldt.jpg">Lestat (Jan Mehlich). Wikimedia.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The public universities of contemporary Europe date from 1945, yet they are based on the early 19th century <a href="http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-idea-of-a-university-today">Humboldtian ideal</a> of academic freedom, and on the value of faculty members who both teach and conduct research. Spreading round the world, this model gave rise to numerous local variations, including in the Anglo-American sphere, which in the 20th century overtook the German-French universities. </p>
<h2>Local variations to similar problems</h2>
<p>Today, the dominance of English-language universities is evident in many different regions of the world. Yet as the article on Japan in this series will illustrate, the mix of internationally circulating university models and national traditions of higher education has produced very different results. Despite pressure to homogenise, the introduction of marketising principles of university management has provoked very different reactions around the world. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-us-liberal-arts-tradition-failed-to-take-hold-in-europe-35791">Italian historian Andrea Mariuzzo shows</a>, <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n10/howard-hotson/dont-look-to-the-ivy-league">idealisation of elite American universities</a> is nothing new in global higher education. But nor is misrepresentation of the US system in order to justify various national projects. Mariuzzo examines Harvard reformers’ efforts in 1945 to define the balance between general liberal education designed to produce citizens, and specialised instruction supposedly aimed at economic success. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, <a href="https://theconversation.com/japanese-universities-struggle-to-find-their-place-in-the-world-38508">Japanese historian Shigeru Okayama</a> describes how European models of higher education influenced the Japanese approach from its inception. But he also exposes the failures of the private university system there, and the growing divide between English and Japanese language teaching. </p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.eui.eu/DepartmentsAndCentres/HistoryAndCivilization/People/Researchers/Index.aspx">collective of doctoral researchers</a> at the European University Institute have <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-universities-becoming-a-plea-from-the-future-37783">also provided a view “from below”</a>, explaining how the marketised university is experienced by those who represent its future. </p>
<h2>Learning from our history</h2>
<p>It is undeniable that some of the current challenges to higher education are specific to our times. But others have a long history, despite being widely seen as new. We often hear that the university is globalising. In fact the nation state remains a key player, and global academia remains primarily a space for international competition. </p>
<p>Within this space, all kinds of international honours contribute to national prestige, and individual scholars mobilise international recognition for national purposes. Distinguishing between which reforms are truly new and which are merely presented as such, and grasping the interplay between global trends and national situations will help us think about how to react in the face of today’s challenges. </p>
<p><em>This is the first in our series, <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/universities-at-the-crossroads">Universities at the crossroads</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35792/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Jackson receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust as an Early Career Fellow, 2014-17.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ann Thomson is a member of the &quot;bureau&quot; of the Association de réflexion sur l&#39;enseignement supérieur et la recherche&quot;, an unaffiliated, non-political group of university teachers and researchers founded to reflect on the situation of higher education and research.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stefan Nygard receives funding from the Academy of Finland.</span></em></p>Is intellectual autonomy being sacrificed to an unworkable vision of financial autonomy for public universities?Simon Jackson, Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Modern Middle Eastern History, University of BirminghamAnn Thomson, Professor of European Intellectual History , European University InstituteStefan Nygard, Academy of Finland researcher, University of HelsinkiLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/341352014-11-19T19:25:15Z2014-11-19T19:25:15ZOnline vs face-to-face learning: why can't we have both?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64347/original/zd8p8d83-1415769196.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People argue over whether learning should take place online or face-to-face, but does it have to be one or the other?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/85589593@N04/8405954920">Flickr/Noticias UFM</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ever since the invention of the printed word, <a href="http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/482/482readings/phaedrus.html">academics have been arguing</a> about the proper place of technology in teaching.</p>
<p>On one side are those who I’ll call the traditionalists who insist on the primacy of face-to-face and barely tolerate online delivery. For the traditionalists, students need, as one colleague put it, to be exposed to the “rhetorical performance of the lecture”. For them, students learn a great deal from simply watching academics nut through problems.</p>
<p>While they may decry passive lectures, their own teaching, they insist, is a highly interactive affair. They adopt a Socratic approach in which they engage students in a rich dialogue. While technologies such as the web have a place in teaching, it is a secondary one, limited for broadcasting announcements and pasting up subject learning guides.</p>
<p>On the other side, are the technologists. The technologists would happily do away with lectures — or give face-to-face teaching the flick entirely. New technologies provide tools for reaching into students’ lives. Students can learn when and where they want. And now that students are getting online delivery at high school, it’s time that universities caught up.</p>
<p>While early versions of online teaching were often cheap and nasty, its present day champions argue that things have gotten a lot better. Learning analytics, for example, provide new ways to track students’ progress and comprehension throughout a subject, permitting more targeted, customised lectures.</p>
<p>As an Associate Dean, I’ve heard passionate defenders of both sides — and I have some sympathy for both.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64422/original/sqh9grn8-1415830305.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64422/original/sqh9grn8-1415830305.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64422/original/sqh9grn8-1415830305.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=450&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64422/original/sqh9grn8-1415830305.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=450&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64422/original/sqh9grn8-1415830305.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=450&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64422/original/sqh9grn8-1415830305.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=566&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64422/original/sqh9grn8-1415830305.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=566&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64422/original/sqh9grn8-1415830305.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=566&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The modern day classroom?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/funfilledgeorgie/8983403509">Flickr/George Redgrave</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Those who defend the face-to-face are absolutely correct: in many instances there is no substitute for meeting in person. Anyone who has taken part in video conferencing or a Skype call knows this to be true.</p>
<p>According to some estimates, non-verbal cues account for up to 60% of communication. No amount of bandwidth can make up for this potential loss of information. No doubt this is part of the diabolical attrition rates for Massive Open Online Courses.</p>
<p>But, at the same time, traditionalists often uncritically equate attendance with attentiveness.</p>
<p>Take a peek from the back of most large lecture theatres, and you’ll discover that many of those students conscientiously tapping away at their laptops are chatting on Facebook or, more depressingly, shopping on ebay.</p>
<p>And those are just the students who bothered to turn up. The uncomfortable truth is, many students vote with their feet and simply don’t go to class.</p>
<p>Some lecturers argue that this is a reason not to put content online in the first place. But the more pertinent question is: if students can pass a subject without turning up to class, then why should they?</p>
<p>As for the Socratic approach, I always wonder what people mean by this. Most of the examples we have of Socrates’ practice comes to us via Plato. In Plato’s writings, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes in <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=SDBODx0ErWcC&amp;pg=PR19&amp;lpg=PR19&amp;dq=organs+without+bodies+socrates&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=dWN6s_V3iS&amp;sig=bLNRaCt1yI45r0A4Vsu5-yKFuUI&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=wdxhVL2qHaLOmQXdlIEI&amp;ved=0CCYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=organs%20without%20bodies%20socrates&amp;f=false">Organs without Bodies</a>, Socrates asks the questions, his companions politely answer and occasionally offer a few feeble challenges, before everyone agrees with Socrates, gushing “The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of your remark”.</p>
<p>As a model for challenging ideas or nutting through complex issues, the example of the Socratic method that has come down to us doesn’t have much to recommend it. It seems better suited to starting a cult. And while that might be good for student retention, I’m not sure that’s what the advocates of the Socratic method were aiming at.</p>
<p>The choice offered by traditionalists and the technologists is a false one. In almost every sphere of life, the online and the face-to-face merge almost seamlessly.</p>
<p>Our personal lives are plastered all over Facebook and Twitter, yet the pervasiveness of cafes suggests that people still want the embodied presence of others. Why should we expect education to be any different?</p>
<p>A more productive conversation is not to insist on the primacy of online or the face-to-face, but rather to wholeheartedly embrace both. This is to leverage different modes of delivery to create more effective learning and teaching experiences.</p>
<p>One way to do so is to harness technology to make more effective use of the valuable time teachers and students meet face-to-face. The guiding principle should be that any transmissible material should be delivered online. It should be put into bite-sized chunks and presented to students to be read/watched/listened to in their own time.</p>
<p>Doing so frees up valuable face-to-face teaching time to engage in active learning exercises, in-class discussions, and practicals.</p>
<p>While wholly online subjects and ones that are delivered predominantly in the face-to-face will continue, the bulk of courses in higher education will begin to resemble the rest of contemporary social life: a complex blending of both the online and face-to-face.</p>
<p>Rather than devoting more time and effort wrestling with the debate between face-to-face and technology, our efforts would be better spent exploring the best practices of education using all the tools at our disposal.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34135/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Scanlon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ever since the invention of the printed word, academics have been arguing about the proper place of technology in teaching. On one side are those who I’ll call the traditionalists who insist on the primacy…Christopher Scanlon, Academic Director, Learning Focus Area Hub, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/305932014-09-10T05:29:12Z2014-09-10T05:29:12ZAfter the crash, who owns the British university in 2014?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58360/original/2rnzg32w-1409931478.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Who owns the university after the crash?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/simononly/7988426445/sizes/l">simononly</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>By international standards, British universities have extraordinarily high levels of autonomy. They control all of their assets, they employ their own staff, renew their own leadership and governors and can enter freely into contracts. They are formally masters of their own fate.</p>
<p>In practice, of course, this autonomy has gone along with dependence on <a href="http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/highereducation/Documents/2013/FundingEnvironmentForUniversities.pdf">government-originated contracts</a> for teaching, research and other services, that impose their own conditions. As a consequence, higher education institutions have learned to lobby – individually and collectively – for their share of public funding.</p>
<p>In 2008, I wrote an optimistic piece for the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) answering the question: “<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/.U9su-s08gVk#.VAnD7WPp_Io">Who owns the university</a>?” My rather jolly conclusion was: “Nobody owns the university for ever, but we can all own it from time to time”.</p>
<p>That was just before the global financial collapse. There have been several consequences of the ensuing “age of austerity” for the global funding of the sector and the strategic direction of universities. Government has sought to cut its recurrent investment while it has in fact simultaneously increased and deferred its liabilities. Special initiatives other than the most politically sensitive, such as trying to widen the intake of people going to university, have dried up. </p>
<p>There has been a <a href="http://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2013-HEPI-Annual-Lecture.pdf">heated, largely unscholarly, debate</a> about whether or not the British higher education sector is losing a global race. All of this has created a paradox (mirrored in advanced higher education systems around the world): as government has sought to invest less it has come to intervene more. And there have been some rapid and probably irreversible developments in university autonomy, especially since the 2008 crash. </p>
<h2>‘Voucherisation’ and its discontents</h2>
<p>What has happened to teaching is often described as “privatisation”; in practice it has been the opposite. First there is the <a href="http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/features/2014/06/higher-and-higher/">voucherisation of undergraduate courses</a> (except in Scotland). In essence, the government is paying up-front the fees for all full-time undergraduates in English, Welsh and Northern Irish institutions who originate in the European Union. It will then seek to get this investment back through the various countries’ tax systems on an income-contingent basis. </p>
<p>Unless and until that money is repaid (and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-can-defuse-the-student-loan-time-bomb-30990">estimates of recovery</a> have now fallen below the costs of the system that this regime was designed to replace) each of these students is in effect a state-sponsored scholar. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the government’s only remaining fiscal control has been through overall student numbers, shortly <a href="https://theconversation.com/abolishing-cap-on-student-numbers-is-a-good-use-of-government-money-24430">to be lifted</a>. So long as these have been restricted, there is no incentive for institutions to do anything other than charge the maximum fee allowable, currently £9,000. </p>
<p>A plan for funding expansion by selling off the loan book associated with the previous fee regime <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jul/20/vince-cable-cabinet-tensions-scrap-student-loan-sell-off">has been abandoned</a>. Now the latest proposal from the former universities minister is to <a href="https://theconversation.com/taking-on-student-debt-would-be-a-corruption-of-university-ideals-30125">get the universities themselves to share the risk</a> by taking on student’s debt. </p>
<p>Other funding for teaching is restricted to courses prioritised by government itself as “<a href="http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/crosscutting/sivs/">strategic and vulnerable subjects</a>”. This continues the long tradition of trying to buck the student market through supply-side interventions in favour of science, technology, engineering and mathematical subjects.</p>
<h2>“For-profits” to the rescue?</h2>
<p>The government’s cavalry over the hill was intended to be the relatively new, for-profit section of the private sector. It was thought this would be lower-cost, more market-responsive, and would widen participation in higher education at minimal expense. As a result, regulatory bars on academic governance, degree-awarding powers, university title and corporate ownership <a href="http://www.hepi.ac.uk/2011/05/05/private-providers-in-uk-higher-education-some-policy-options/">were all systematically lowered</a>.</p>
<p>Many of these new institutions – some appearing overnight – immediately began sucking in student-based “vouchers” in return <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-regulation-still-needed-to-prevent-cashpoint-colleges-27293">for woefully inadequate provision</a>. The results were so disastrous that the government had to call a halt to funding their registered students. This is almost exactly what had happened with New Labour’s <a href="http://www.nao.org.uk/report/individual-learning-accounts/">Individual Learning Accounts</a> only just over a decade earlier. </p>
<p>Not only had ministers and their officials failed to look back, but they also failed to look abroad. <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/government-guilty-of-abject-failure-over-for-profits-policy/2014747.article">All of these lessons</a> could have been easily gleaned from the experience with federally funded students of for-profit institutions in the USA.</p>
<h2>Sub-prime higher ed</h2>
<p>The result has been the relentless march of debt – even if repayment is significantly deferred. This has moral as well as economic consequences. Some opinion leaders, including the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26338661">politicians principally responsible</a> have actively encouraged student debtors to take on the debt on the understanding that it will in effect be written off. </p>
<p>This is not far away from the circumstances of the causes of the 2008 crash: mortgage lenders in the USA described serial re-mortgaging as a bet you couldn’t lose, because of the ineluctable appreciation of property values. Headline writers saw the analogy early: <a href="http://nypost.com/2010/06/06/subprime-goes-to-college/">“Sub-prime goes to College”</a>, wrote the New York Post in 2010. </p>
<p>Another relatively unsung, negative consequence of this state penetration of the system is its homogenisation. British political discussions about funding higher education always converge on the needs and support of younger, full-time participants, living and studying away from home. </p>
<p>The latest coalition settlement <a href="http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/heinengland/2014report/HEinEngland_2014.pdf">has led to the melting away</a> of part-time and mature entrants, as well as a dramatic fall in post-graduate enrolments. The UK is in danger of losing its position as <a href="http://www.niace.org.uk/lifelonglearninginquiry/docs/IFLL-Sector-Paper8.pdf">the most diverse system in Europe</a> by level and mode of study, and by breadth of participation.</p>
<h2>Research – and a Faustian pact</h2>
<p>In terms of research funding, there is a similar sense of greater rather than less government involvement as the funder of last resort. </p>
<p>First, there is a professional consensus that the funding of science is heading for the cliff-edge. The Learned Societies are unanimous that the <a href="https://royalsociety.org/%7E/media/policy/Publications/2013/scientific-research-funding/2013-05-20-science-research-funding.pdf">public purse must carry</a> the strain. British industry has always been reluctant to fill the gap and austerity has reinforced this.</p>
<p>The price of government support has been a Faustian Pact: university research must be “useful”, and rapidly so. The <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/28/jonathan-wolff-research-excellence-framework">biting of the “impact” apple</a> as part of the current assessment of the quality of university research – accounting for 20% of the scores in the current <a href="http://www.ref.ac.uk/">Research Excellence Framework</a> – is a token of this. </p>
<p>The silver lining in this context is the capacity of top researchers to subvert both institutional and national strategies. At the very highest levels of research achievement, bottom-up, multi-institutional, <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7451/full/497557a.html">cross-national networks increasingly rule</a>. Top research is probably best placed to prosper in the new university universe, but at the price of pulling up the ladder on a worthy and productive mainstream.</p>
<h2>Whose system is it anyway?</h2>
<p>All of this leads to the critical question of public confidence: whose system is this, anyway? One of the most dangerous outcomes has been a widespread confusion of reputation and quality. Students have learned, for example, that prestigious employers continue to screen job applicants by the institutions they have studied in. They <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/sep/05/students-choose-prestigious-universities">will choose these</a> over courses they might find more satisfying and better taught. </p>
<p>The Russell Group’s self-promotion as representing the best of the system has been uncritically accepted by both government and the media. The empirical problem is <a href="http://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Only-Connect-AS-PUBLISHED.pdf">that it doesn’t</a>. </p>
<p>Well-qualified, non-standard entrants who opt for courses outside a small number of “leading research universities” are dismissed by the country’s leading charitable group on widening participation – the Sutton Trust – as <a href="http://www.suttontrust.com/researcharchive/wasted-talent-attrition-rates-high-achieving-pupils-school-university/">“wasted talent”</a>. </p>
<p>At the same time, various inter-generational tensions have intensified. Demand for higher education has <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/education-28772974">shown no signs of abating</a>, even while the “underemployment” moral panic (“you’re better off without a degree”) intensifies. Government policy identifies potential solely with school examination grades, for example by <a href="http://www.ucas.com/how-it-all-works/undergraduate/understanding-student-number-controls">de-restricting university recruitment</a> of those with high A Level scores. It thereby undermines its own intentions of driving social mobility by diversifying the recruitment to what it sees as “top universities”.</p>
<h2>After 2015</h2>
<p>The most pressing political priority is the unspoken understanding that that the arrangements for fees and funding are not sustainable. As we approach an election in May 2015 that is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/21/ed-davey-liberal-democrats-coalition-labour-general-election-2015">likely to lead to further coalition government</a>, the main parties are all paralysed by the question of what to do about higher education. </p>
<p>The big question after the election will be “what on earth have we done?” Unpicking the current settlement will be hard enough; finding an alternative around which consensus could be built at present seems <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/ideology-the-enemy-of-a-sane-funding-system/2014816.article">simply too hard</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58361/original/2xnpsqq8-1409931877.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58361/original/2xnpsqq8-1409931877.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=398&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58361/original/2xnpsqq8-1409931877.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=398&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58361/original/2xnpsqq8-1409931877.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=398&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58361/original/2xnpsqq8-1409931877.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=501&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58361/original/2xnpsqq8-1409931877.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=501&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58361/original/2xnpsqq8-1409931877.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=501&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Humboldt was right: the university needs “freedom and loneliness”</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/23575499@N04/5107090064/sizes/l">andreas.zachmann</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Historically, universities have always been more comfortable fulfilling a major role within civil society than as instruments of state policy, and so it should be. All around the world, universities that align themselves too closely with state leadership <a href="https://theconversation.com/facing-up-to-the-c-word-corruption-in-higher-education-23854">have come to undermine</a> their core values.</p>
<p>The big story here is about how the UK state wants to withdraw (<a href="http://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Publication-Robbins-Revisited-Bigger-and-Better-Higher-Education-David-Willetts.pdf">so it says</a>) but has become more and more entwined. It now “owns” and directs more of the enterprise than it did before 2008, despite protestations to the contrary. </p>
<p>The response from the higher education sector could be best characterised as truculent passivity. Universities are temporarily in reasonable financial shape. But their leaders know, in their hearts, that this situation is hugely unstable. One of the biggest fears is of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/universities-need-more-than-a-pledge-to-reduce-student-fees-25186">partisan downward bidding war</a> on the maximum fee they are allowed to charge students. </p>
<p>The classic statement of university autonomy is that of Prussian philosopher 18th century reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt: that the university will best serve society in “<a href="https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/215874/1">freedom and loneliness</a>”.
This case needs to be put again, and urgently. It will have to be led by the universities themselves, and it will take collective courage.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/30593/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Watson is Professor of Higher Education and Principal of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. He is a Trustee of the the Nuffield Foundation.</span></em></p>By international standards, British universities have extraordinarily high levels of autonomy. They control all of their assets, they employ their own staff, renew their own leadership and governors and…David Watson, Professor of Higher Education and Principal, Green Templeton College, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/296572014-07-29T20:27:09Z2014-07-29T20:27:09ZTechnology improves higher learning, it doesn't kill it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54975/original/5my66p7z-1406508138.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It was thought the printing press would make lectures redundant, but instead universities used the technology to their advantage. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/seattlemunicipalarchives/4112145071">Flickr/Seattle Municipal Archives</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As MOOC mania approached its peak in 2012, Anant Agarwal, the president of the Massive Open Online Course platform <a href="https://www.edx.org/">edX</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn5MkE-djxA">claimed</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Online education for students around the world will be the next big thing in education. This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The claim was repeated many times. Indeed, 15 years earlier, management guru <a href="http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0310/5905122a.html">Peter Drucker</a> had anticipated this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It’s as large a change as when we first got the printed book.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That seemed improbable since university lectures have been as important in the five-and-a-half centuries since Gutenberg invented the printing press as they presumably were for the three-and-a-half centuries before. Yet printing had profound and pervasive effects on society, as has been established by many, notably Elizabeth Eisenstein in her study on <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/ca/academic/subjects/history/european-history-after-1450/printing-press-agent-change">The Printing Press as an Agent of Change</a>.</p>
<p>In a paper published recently in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/thed20/current#.U9Woh4BdUVk">History of Education</a>, I considered <a href="https://www.academia.edu/7757072/Gutenbergs_effects_on_universities">how printing changed universities</a>, such as their lectures and libraries.</p>
<h2>How did printing change lectures?</h2>
<p>At least some medieval universities had cursory lectures in which bachelor students read set texts to undergraduates to take notes or dictation. Cursory lectures were necessary when undergraduates did not have access to set texts because manuscripts were far too expensive to be afforded by most students. Printing greatly increased the availability and affordability of texts, thus removing the need for cursory lectures, which were therefore ended at Oxford at least by 1584.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/55087/original/yqtdzm6g-1406595407.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/55087/original/yqtdzm6g-1406595407.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/55087/original/yqtdzm6g-1406595407.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=688&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55087/original/yqtdzm6g-1406595407.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=688&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55087/original/yqtdzm6g-1406595407.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=688&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55087/original/yqtdzm6g-1406595407.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=865&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55087/original/yqtdzm6g-1406595407.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=865&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55087/original/yqtdzm6g-1406595407.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=865&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Early manuscripts were so expensive, they would be read to students in lecture halls to transcribe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/58558794@N07/7740984838/in/photolist-cN3z6Q-bQycRa-bQycQg-9UkTQE-e89quR-e8f5C3-9UfkRg-9G3r1x-e8nP4F-e8f5Ab-9LEcxd-9LBpFx-ccHkAQ-9G3r4n-9UfkWM-9Yo3M5-9G78au-9Vct5k-kra4za-e89rL2-czmwWA-cMnzTG-a4NG3z-9U1f9n-9ZU1Ch-9ZRatD-bQeWHM-cMnA7W-9UkTRU-9PERK7-bQeWPP-9ZU2tW-fyf4JP-9Ufmsa-9Uia49-fmhtrN-drfpei-9upGKb-fyf3PV-9Vct7r-jsUjqg-9upGLE-jsWccN-kyC5Zh-bJiqeZ-9Vctae-9VfiDm-9U1frg-fyumcs-9mPk4V">Flickr/POP</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Masters at all medieval universities offered at least one other type of lecture, “<em>cum questionibus</em>” (with questions), or expository lectures which posed problems and questions arising from the text. Some contemporaries suggested that printing would make even these lectures redundant. </p>
<p>Autodidacticism, or self-directed learning, was one of the points raised by the Benedictine scribe Filippo de Strata in his argument against printing in 1473. Yet lectures persisted after printed books became ubiquitous, despite problems with attendance (then, as ever!).</p>
<p>This is because lectures and other traditional face-to-face and mediated teaching modes help students to manage their learning: maintaining motivation, identifying and using resources to support their learning, planning and scheduling their study, assessing their progress and adjusting strategies. Students also need modelling, help and support in mastering material, diagnosing individual problems and overcoming their specific difficulties.</p>
<h2>How did printing change libraries?</h2>
<p>The effect of printing on scholarly libraries illustrates a different point. Libraries in medieval European universities loaned manuscript books to masters to use in their teaching and scholarship. This role became redundant when printing made books affordable for masters and students (although libraries were closed to undergraduates who at Cambridge were subject to a fine even for entering them in the early 17th century). As scholar Andrew Pettegree observed in <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300110098">The Book in the Renaissance</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the library had struggled to find a role in the new age of print. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>University libraries did not develop a new role until the 18th century when books became so numerous that scholars could no longer have in their personal collections all the texts that they would routinely use. A pedagogical role emerged for libraries in helping students structure, navigate and manage the texts relevant to their learning.</p>
<p>This pedagogic role was of course new and very different from any role that libraries had served before printing. A contemporary analogy might be what is often called <a href="http://www.netliteracy.org/digital-literacy/">digital literacies</a>, which libraries are also supporting.</p>
<h2>Technology improves universities</h2>
<p>Print, like digitisation, greatly increases and facilitates access to information, making learning resources much more accessible. But while printing greatly expanded the provision of information, it did not change the way people learn.</p>
<p>It is clear that the current information revolution is transforming society and that it is at least facilitating contemporary universities’ teaching. But by extension from printing’s effects on early modern universities, the central issue is the extent to which the information revolution is transforming in addition to facilitating universities’ teaching.</p>
<p>Clearly neither MOOCs nor online learning generally have fulfilled the predictions of what Canadian higher education analyst <a href="http://higheredstrategy.com/udacity-has-left-the-building/">Alex Usher</a> called the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>techno-fetishist windbags who tried to make us all believe that the VC-funded MOOCs were an unstoppable wave of the future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Online learning experts <a href="http://blog.edtechie.net/about/">Martin Weller</a> and <a href="http://www.tonybates.ca/tony-bates-associates/tony-bates-biography/">Tony Bates</a> are rightly annoyed that the MOOC-hypers felt no need to inform themselves on 40 years’ <a href="http://blog.edtechie.net/openness/stop-me-if-you-think-youve-heard-this-one-before/">expertise</a> and <a href="http://www.tonybates.ca/2014/01/21/a-review-of-a-harvardmit-research-paper-on-edx-moocs/">experience</a> of mediated learning and <a href="http://www.tonybates.ca/2014/04/15/time-to-retire-from-online-learning/">20 years of online learning</a> because their self-declared “disruption” somehow made all previous knowledge about teaching-learning redundant.</p>
<p>While MOOCs have usefully woken elite universities to online learning, which they <a href="http://www.tonybates.ca/2014/04/15/time-to-retire-from-online-learning/">mostly ignored for two decades</a>, they are unlikely to “disrupt” universities any more than Gutenberg’s information revolution disrupted early modern universities. Rather more likely is that, as with printing, informal, open and online learning will be absorbed within existing universities to augment and improve their practices.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/29657/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>RMIT supported the work upon which this piece is based. Gavin does not know whether RMIT will be advantaged or &#39;disrupted&#39; by online education.</span></em></p>As MOOC mania approached its peak in 2012, Anant Agarwal, the president of the Massive Open Online Course platform edX, claimed: Online education for students around the world will be the next big thing…Gavin Moodie, Adjunct professor, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.